Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)

Self Description

December 2005: "The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985. It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States...It is the Center's mission to expand the base of public knowledge and understanding of the need for an immigration policy that gives first concern to the broad national interest. The Center is animated by a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted. "

Third-Party Descriptions

May 2009: '"It's a good program. It's a very expensive program," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that advocates tighter immigration controls. "I don't know if it's feasible or sensible for all state and local governments."'

November 2007: 'The biggest change is in the political climate,' says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that opposes illegal immigration. 'Before the collapse of the comprehensive amnesty bill, a lot of people thought they would pass piecemeal the DREAM Act and smaller amnesties. Now they can't even get their consolation prizes through Congress.'

November 2007: 'Benefits are a zero-sum game,' explains Bryan Griffith, a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates restricting immigration. 'When you're giving them out, you should be giving them out to those who are here legally.'

October 2007: 'Will it be disruptive to the economy? To some degree sure it will. Will it cripple it? No,' says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C. 'Employers have known for a long time that this was coming.'

October 2007: 'Several Southern companies have raised wages to attract new workers after immigration raids. “But that’s not the first thing that employers are going to do,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re going to try to cast their net wider before they do something that will raise costs.”'

October 2007: "Eduardo Gonzalez, a petty officer second class with the U.S. Navy, is about to be deployed overseas for a third time...His wife faces deportation to Guatemala...That's just fine, according to Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which lobbies for tougher laws on illegal immigration.

October 2006: "Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes immigration increases, expressed regret for illegal immigrants who fell sick after working at Ground Zero but said they should not have been allowed to enter the country illegally."

Articles and Resources

QUOTE: For months, officials say, the house was home to “maternity tourists,” in this case, women from China who had paid tens of thousands of dollars to deliver their babies in the United States, making the infants automatic American citizens. Officials shut down the home, sending the 10 mothers who had been living there with their babies to nearby motels.

QUOTE: [ Hector] Veloz is one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have landed in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and struggled to prove they don't belong there, according to advocacy groups and legal scholars, who have tracked such cases around the country. Some citizens have been deported.

QUOTE: While the Veteran Affairs Department deemed the Russian immigrant [Natalia Goukassian] (not yet a legal resident) eligible for surviving-spouse benefits, immigration officials at Homeland Security took a very different view: at Natalia's interview for legal residence the next year, she was told that because she hadn't been married long enough before Tigran [her American husband] died, she would be deported.

QUOTE: Some undocumented immigrants swept up on minor charges such as fishing without a license won’t face federal detention. Instead, they’ll be released on their own recognizance... could affect at least some of the 66 US law enforcement jurisdictions that are part of a controversial program which, in essence, deputizes local police to act as de facto immigration agents.

QUOTE: U.S. civil rights leaders said yesterday that an increase in hate crimes committed in recent years against Hispanics... "correlates closely" to the nation's increasingly contentious debate over immigration.

QUOTE: The Obama administration is expanding a program initiated by President George W. Bush aimed at checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails....By matching inmates' fingerprints to federal immigration databases, authorities hope to pinpoint deportable illegal immigrants before they are released from custody.

QUOTE: The recession – and a big state deficit ­– is leading some California counties to cut back on nonemergency health services to illegal immigrants. In others, cutbacks in services for the uninsured are hitting illegal immigrants especially hard.

QUOTE: Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, who led the effort, said the arrests were for violations of state identity theft laws. But he also seemed proud to have found a way around rules allowing only the federal government to enforce immigration laws. In his office, the sheriff displayed a framed editorial cartoon that showed Daniel Boone admiring his arrest of at least 27 illegal workers.

QUOTE: To many illegal immigrants, sneaking into the United States is at worst a minor violation -- a breach of the rules so small, and so necessary, as to be beyond even mild reproach. To many Americans, the act of entering the United States without permission taints every aspect of an illegal immigrant's existence in the country.

QUOTE: Foreign-born New Yorkers are better educated, more likely to have health insurance and less likely to have entered the country illegally compared with immigrants in the rest of the country, according to a new analysis.

QUOTE: While roughly two-thirds of immigrant-related ordinances enacted over the past 18 months have been hard on immigrants, in a handful of communities – particularly those with a longer history of immigrants – leaders are taking a different tack, and finding approaches to help immigrants integrate.

QUOTE: With time running out, the best prospect for any immigration measure is to be added to one of the must-pass spending bills for fiscal year 2008. But even measures with broad-based support, such as strengthening borders, are becoming grist for partisan firefights.

QUOTE: Across the country, the federal effort to flush out illegal immigrants is having major effects on workers and employers alike. Some companies have reluctantly raised wages to attract new workers following raids at their plants.

QUOTE: But a crucial, unresolved question is whether the bulk of these mismatches involve legal workers, who could be fired because of a clerical mishap, or illegal immigrants, abusing a system that has long tolerated, and some say even encouraged, their work in the US.

QUOTE: Fear and anger are pulsing these days through the Liberian community in [America]. Barring action by the Bush administration or Congress...3,500 Liberians will be subject to deportation Oct 1. Since 1991, they have been allowed to live and work in the United States...

QUOTE: [The U.S.] military [is] in the middle of a vicious war, stretched to the breaking point for want of fresh recruits, and a potential recruit rejected for want of legal immigration papers... It's the bitter politics of immigration that's getting in the way.

QUOTE: as the emotionally charged issue of immigration consumes the U.S. Senate and the nation this month, skilled foreign professionals are almost as contentious a part of the restructuring debate as impoverished illegal immigrants who sneak across the Mexican border to harvest crops or hang drywall. In many ways, the proposed legislation favors high-skilled immigrants and the industries that employ them.

QUOTE: As the government's crackdown on illegal immigrant workers has intensified in recent months, so have the consequences for a large subgroup of U.S. citizens: American-born children of illegal immigrants...Until recently, their parents' illegal status had limited impact on these children's lives, because, although every year hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are detained attempting to cross the U.S. border, once they make it in, they are rarely caught.